Hi Miguel,
I've also had the same backup concerns as you and have used a hard drive duplicator made by Corporate Systems to backup my drive. The link for their product is below...As outlined in a previous post, I'm very glad I did this because I had my main Central hard drive fail on me last summer. Luckily, I was able to break out my backup drive, and add about 15-20 CDs to get it back up to snuff...

http://www.driveduplicators.com/

The latest version of Partition Magic (8.0, I believe) recognizes a valid Central disc and showed what looked to be valid partition information (earlier versions said the Central drive was "Bad" even when I knew it worked in the Central). So maybe Partition Magic could help you copy the partitions to a backup drive on your PC...

In any event, I think it's a smart thing to make a backup hard drive because of all the ripping time spent and also the time spent fixing titles, etc.....I've never tried to connect a second drive to the machine for the purpose of copying, so I guess that might be another way to do it like Tony says if you have the command knowledge, etc.

If someone does that, I'd appreciate a tutorial or some sort of writeup that we could all use on our own boxes (and I'd also like to learn more about the various Linux commands that it would take to make a backup drive...)

Thanks, Randy